The dev plan is designed to offer the database features required for development and testing, without the production-grade operations, monitoring, and support found in our paid plans. Fork, follow, and automatic database backups are not available on the dev plan (manual backups are available on the dev plan).

In addition, the dev plan will have a limit on the number of rows that can be stored in the database. This represents a departure from the sized-based limit on our current shared plan, and is due to the fact that data storage layer mechanisms can cause confusing discrepancies relative to what a user would expect, particularly for small data sets. The limit will be set such that databases under the current size limit should be under the record limit as well.

The dev plan is available for testing in public beta. Although it is not designed for mission-critical data in any case (it is a development plan after all), the risk of data loss or unavailability is increased as a beta product. The dev plan will continue to be free once it has been released from beta.

Once out of beta, the dev plan will replace the Postgres 8.3-based shared-database plans as the default & free relational database service on Heroku. The $15/month, Postgres 8.3-based 20gb plan continues to be available during this beta. It will also be replaced with a Postgres 9.1-based plan at a comparable price point.

It also replaces the private-beta Postgres 9.1-based heroku-shared-postgresql add-on, which is immediately deprecated.